by Carrie Lange
His face roasted as he fiddled with a loose thread on the hem of his shirt.
One of those uncomfortable silences, the kind that makes people want to hold their breath and not move their head for fear the creaking of their vertebrae might interrupt something, settled on the air. It was also the kind of silence that invariably makes an itch tingle across a person’s face, or climb up their throat.
Anne scratched her nose.
Sean coughed.
He was fairly certain he had just fucked up big time.
Anne turned to him, one shining tear rolling down her cheek. She sat up straighter and wiped both hands down across her face. “I don’t belong here. I’m sorry...I have to go.”
She grabbed her purse from the table and walked toward the door.
Sean hung his head low and sighed. “Anne, you don’t have to go. Just forget what I said. I’m sorry. But don’t go. Please.” He walked over to her and put his hand over hers, which was clutching the door knob.
She whispered so low that he almost couldn’t hear her. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
He shouldn’t have said any of that to her. It was too early. How could he have been so stupid? “You have nothing to be sorry about. Look, I’m not trying to do anything, I promise. I just want to help.”
“It’s all right, Sean. Look, I have to go to work tomorrow anyway. Can I come over on my day off?”
“Sure, sure, of course! You can come over anytime. You’re always welcome, always. I’ll do anything to get you through this, Anne.”
She smiled. “You’ll have more Ecstasy won’t you?”
Chapter 38
If you’re going through Hell, keep going.
~ Winston Churchill
~~~~~
June slipped into July.
Dan had been dead for over two months. The world kept turning, birds kept singing, time kept marching onward.
For twenty-nine years, Anne had marched onward, head down, shuffled this way and that by the multitudes around her.
On the day she saw Dan for the last time, on a cold metal table, she sat.
The throng had continued. Marching. Marching. Marching. Forever onward. Not noticing her absence. Heads down, they were shuffled this way and that, sometimes fumbling and falling.
But the throng swept up the fallen and carried them along. Not with loving arms and gentle hands, but with the sheer weight of their force and the heavy boots of their ever marching feet.
Anne understood now. Dan had fallen, and instead of being swept along, had been crushed by the throng of Life. It would not crush her however, because it had passed her by. She was bruised and battered, but remained.
In the distance, she saw it, a cloud of dust hovering around where Life trudged and trampled all in its path.
Her daughter was somewhere beneath that dust cloud.
Anne tried to get up and move forward. A mother should not sit down, while her child is carried away from her. But the ground beneath her, trampled with the tears and blood of the fallen, clung to her. She could not pull herself out of the morass of her despair.
And what, she asked herself, would she do if she caught hold of her daughter? Sit down with her in the mud?
Anne wanted the three of them to be together again, like it used to be. And she did not want to abandon her daughter to the cruel march of a heartless world. The logical solution, it seemed, was for her and Alexandra to join Dan on that little sandy bank by the sparkling river. The river that she had seen in her vision.
No mud. No trampling feet. No pain.
At first, this logic seemed flawed, and quickly disregarded. Suicide was one thing. Murder, quite another. The grief clouded her mind, she realized.
All the more reason to get her affairs in order quickly and get her suicide completed. Alexandra deserved to have her own life, and she would forget about her mother and Dan. Pain was a part of life. Everyone suffered, and Alexandra would be no different.
She would march along and she would suffer, but she would be alive. She would be much better off without a mother like Anne.
As time went on, however, the logic grew more sound. Wasn’t it a mother’s job to protect her child from pain and suffering? There was no pain or suffering of any kind on that little sandy bank by the sparkling river.
But how could she do it now, she wondered. She had lost her chance at getting Sean’s gun. When she didn’t have Alexandra, she spent most of her free time with him, rolling on Ecstasy, escaping the pain. But the gun was gone along with the cold medicine and sharp knives. And Anne didn’t know where he hid the drugs anymore, either. She had looked.
The gun would have been the best way. Quick and painless, the homicide detective had told her.
He had told her other things as well, but Anne no longer thought about those things.
Sitting by the tub, bathing Alexandra, thoughts floated through her foggy mind. How long would it take? Hadn’t she read somewhere that drowning was a peaceful way to die? Would Alexandra fight her?
The images of Alexandra’s peaceful, still body under the water were replaced with visions of her flailing and screaming and crying.
Anne blinked. “Stop it!” she yelled.
“What, Mama?” Alexandra’s tiny voice echoed in the confines of the steamy bathroom.
“Nothing, sweetie. Come on, let’s get you out of that water.”
“No, Mama, I play some more, please?”
“Now, Alexandra!”
Anne’s voice was too loud, and she whisked the stopper from the drain and threw it across the room. It struck the closed door and bounced on the floor.
Alexandra sat with her mouth open, as the water swirled around her. “Okay Mama, I get out now.”
In these small moments, Anne was able to deny and swat away the logic that gnawed its way into her consciousness. Little by little, however, it bored and chewed through her defenses.
Until finally, the day came when Anne could no longer find any flaw in the logic at all. Why would a mother flee to the golden shores of paradise and leave her child helpless, in the toil and misery of the mortal coil? Only a selfish mother would do that. A good mother protects her child above all else. A good mother never abandons her child.
Driving down the interstate, approaching the concrete over-pass, Anne wondering briefly if she would have time to reach back and unfasten Alexandra’s car seat belt. Her foot pressed down on the gas pedal. Sixty. Sixty-five. Anne unbuckled her own seat belt. Seventy. Seventy-five. She reached back, fumbling for the release and felt Alexandra’s tiny warm hand upon her own.
Anne shook her head, as if waking from a nightmare. Her foot eased off the gas pedal.
A new feeling of urgency began to drive her forward, for she knew that she could not refute the logic much longer.
She bought the book ‘Final Exit’, a handbook to euthanasia for the terminally ill. She smiled at how simple and painless it would be. A few sleeping pills, and a plastic bag, and then eternity. She made a checklist, and started from the top, working her way down to her ‘final exit’.
She increased the limits on her life insurance policy. She set up a Children’s Trust, so that most of the money would be set aside for Alexandra. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars was a tidy sum. She grew more excited as she finished each task on her checklist, and the day grew closer. She found that the closer she got to her suicide, the more relaxed and content she became. Her appetite returned. She smiled more.
The man in Boise, at the home office of the insurance company had paused momentarily after Anne asked him if her policy paid out if she killed herself. “Well…I mean…you’re not planning to… to…kill yourself…are you?” And he gave a slight chuckle.
Anne forced a smile onto her face because someone had once told her that people can hear a smile over the phone. “Oh, no, no! Of course not! I didn’t mean to scare you! No, I’m just making sure, you know, this pays out no matter what. You know, weird things happen, and I’m just
trying to be responsible and understand my policy.”
The insurance agent gave a big sigh and a full bodied chuckle. “Oh, thank Gawd! You had me nervous there, for a minute!” More chuckling. “Yes, well, you’ve had this policy long enough that it will pay out no matter how you die. Don’t worry, after a certain amount of time, suicide clauses and other restrictions on pay-out have to be rescinded. You’re covered.”
Occasionally, Anne was bothered by troublesome thoughts.
Committing suicide just like Dan did? Isn’t his suicide what makes him a complete asshole?
Anne quickly dispelled this recurring nuisance, however.
“That’s different! Dan had no good reason to kill himself. I do. It’s his fault I’m doing this. Fuck off.”
You’re going to do to them, what he did to you.
“Do to who? Who gives a shit about me? No one that I can see. My rotting corpse could have laid in this apartment for days and no one would even miss me.”
Sean would miss you.
“He’d get over it.”
Maybe that’s what Dan thought, too.
“Fuck off.”
Chapter 39
At first, Dan had thought Anne saved when she put the gun down. The climax reached, the princess rescued. After that moment, he had even considered looking for those white shores that Rale had spoken of.
It didn’t take long, however, before he recognized the new phase she moved into. The quiet contemplation phase. The careful planning phase. This, he realized was even more dangerous than when she had a loaded gun to her head. She was using her logic now, and insane logic is often impossible to shake. He knew, first hand.
And then Dan began thinking of other things Rale had spoken of.
Tar.
And guilt.
And punishment.
Rale had said a lot more about Tar than Tar had said about himself. Dan began to wonder why Tar was really here. He tried to remember if Tar had ever actually spoken of being in real Heaven.
When Dan had asked him about where he went off to, Tar would always say, “in my Heaven.” Dan was no longer sure what that meant. Tar said he had let go of his mortal life long ago. Was there something else he still held onto?
Finally, Dan asked him one day as they watched Anne and Alexandra feed bread to ducks at the little lake beside her apartment building. “Tar, I want to know about when you were alive. And how you died.”
“Why would you want to know that?”
“I’m just curious. You know so much about me, but I know almost nothing about you.”
Tar laid on his back on the ground, looked up at the fluffy white cotton ball clouds which blanketed the sky, and swept his hands over the thick grass. “None of that matters anymore, Dan. I let go of that li––”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You let go of that life a long time ago.” Dan sat beside him and picked at the blades of grass. The hot sun warmed his face, and a gentle breeze rustled a wind chime somewhere close by. The sleepy, murmuring tones floated through the air, wrapped around him, and pulled on his eyelids.
Dan blinked several times and glanced over at Tar who had closed his eyes, a hint of a smile on his face. “Tar, I don’t think I believe you anymore. If it’s true, and you let go of that life, then why aren’t you in real Heaven right now?”
Dan motioned toward the area around them, which was crowded with ducks and the occasional goose, all vying for the next ball of soft, mushy manna that would come flying from Alexandra’s hand. “Why do you keep coming here to be with me?”
Tar frowned and sat up. “I came here because you asked for help. Or have you forgotten that day not so long ago when you were down on your knees groveling before your own bloody corpse?”
“Oh yes, I remember that day. And I remember thinking you were God. Or maybe an angel sent to help me. You were snide then too. And you know what? I’m beginning to think you’re full of shit. I think maybe you’re just a man who’s stuck here, the same as me.”
Tar stood, a full blown scowl now on his face as he looked down at Dan. “I never claimed to be anything other than a man. I always told you I was a spirit just like you. And maybe if you would for once think about someone other than yourself, you would––”
“How did you die, Tar?”
“It’s none of your damn business.” Tar turned away, and Dan could tell he was about to leave.
Dan jumped up, and the volume of his voice rose significantly. “Did Rale kill you?”
Tar froze and Dan knew he had hit a nerve. He remained silent and did not dare move a muscle.
Tar did not turn around, but hung his head and sighed. “He told you that, eh?”
“Well…sort of. He said it wasn’t his fault. What happened? Was it an accident?”
At this, Tar turned sharply, his eyes a sea of flame. “It was no accident. Of that you can be assured.”
Perhaps realizing he had said more than intended, he shook his head and glared at Dan before disappearing with a flash of red, electric fire.
Chapter 40
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
~ C.S. Lewis
~~~~~
As Anne surfed the web, the abundance of ‘After Death Communication’ and ‘Near Death Experience’ sites assured her she wasn’t the only one searching for answers, or possibly a shoulder to cry on.
She no longer sought out support from her family or friends. Sean supported her in the only way she would allow - with drugs and a safe place to use them. She could tell he wanted her to stop taking so much and he gradually cut her back. No matter, she told herself, this would all be over soon anyway.
After his confession, she had to be careful around him for both of their sakes. His feelings for her could not be allowed to run deeper. All the harder it would be on him when she died. She would not allow herself to consider the possibility of her feelings ever running deeper for him.
Anne did not want to get over Dan. She did not want to move on or love another man. Sean would be kept safely at a distance.
She had come to rely on Dan’s family. Several times she had made the hour long drive to their house. Her suicide would affect them, of course, considering how close they had grown these past two months, but her death would pale in comparison to losing a son.
And she could make them understand. There would not be a three sentence note left behind. In a way, this was her testament to their son. Perhaps they would even find a way to be proud of him, proud of the impact he had on another person.
Alone in her apartment, when Alexandra was either asleep or with her father, Anne sought comfort from the sea of faceless strangers waiting inside her computer. Scrolling through message boards, most words spoke of losing parents, or children, or spouses.
Widows.
They were the ones given all the comfort that she was denied. Badges of honor and of suffering were lauded upon them by a compassionate world which turned its back on her.
“It’s not like you were married to the man.”
She had never posted anything. It was too much trouble. But an urge came upon her, and she quite unexpectedly found herself typing away furiously on her keyboard. Safe from pain in her anger, a cathartic release of energy flowing out through her fingertips. click-click-click-click. The staccato cadence tapped her spirit, hammering out her fury one releasing click at a time.
This after death communication trip is all bullshit. I’ve stared into mirrors until I’m hypnotized, and still see nothing but a memory of him. And my memory is fading. I’ve listened to recorded white noise from my apartment until my ears ring and I start making shit up, pretending I’m hearing his voice in the garbled static that spews out. I’ve scribbled useless crap across dozens of pieces of paper that all end up in the garbage can. If I ever see him again, it will be from my own God damned grave.
And much to her surprise, there was a response to her post the next day.
Hi Anne,
I am replying to your comment on the After Death Communication web site. I know something of what you’re going through. I’ve been with my fiancée, Kim, for four years. She died a month and a half ago from liver damage due to drinking. I’ve found some peace and I’d like to share that with you, if you like. If not, tell me to get lost and I’ll respect that.
~ Chris
Anne read the message several times. A fiancée, eh? And he lost her just a few weeks ago. Well, it’s worth a shot.
Dear Chris,
Hi, thanks for writing to me. It has been 8 weeks since Dan died. Mostly what I am fighting now is the strong desire to follow
him. Do you feel suicidal?
~ Anne
Hi Anne,
I pray to God to take me. I don’t care if I get hit by a bus or murdered. But suicide? I can’t do it myself. I have to wait for God to take me. Then I’ll get everything I’ve been denied here.
~ Chris
This person sounded like he might understand. Is wanting to die the same thing as wanting to kill yourself?
Dear Chris,
Yes, my first choice would be to die naturally. I leave my door unlocked now and sometimes I wander alone at night. I don’t wear my seatbelt anymore. And when I clean the kitchen, I don’t dry my hands when I plug the coffee maker in and out.
I don’t really have anyone here to talk to, or anyone who understands. A lot of people just want to hear the gory details. They want to know what kind of gun he used, and if he blew his brains out, and all that. But I won’t tell them.